SABIC was on hand to showcase its disruptive innovation in thermoplastic composite materials and manufacturing during JEC World. As a global leader in the chemical industry, the company was keen to unveil several new breakthrough innovations in materials and manufacturing, designed to drive broader adoption of strong, lightweight thermoplastic composites across a variety of industries.
Specifically, the company displayed its growing portfolio of continuous fibre reinforced thermoplastic composite (CFRTC) UDMAX tapes, with a particular focus on a revolutionary, fully-automated, large-scale production system for composite laminates that optimises quality, speed, flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
Called the ‘new Digital Composites Manufacturing line’ it’s designed to satisfy the latest increasing demands for new material technologies that are lighter in weight, higher in strength and aesthetically innovative. Manufactured using a resin rich surface, SABIC’s continuous fibre reinforced thermoplastic composite material UDMAX tapes can be combined with glass or carbon fibre to enable enhanced physical properties in comparison to traditional metallic materials, as well as providing shorter cycle times in production compared to thermoset prepregs.
Indeed, current conversion processes of composite tapes have been labour-intensive and expensive in the past, which makes it economically challenging to leverage the benefits of composites in mass volume - until now. Enter SABIC and its partner, The Netherlands-based advanced composites manufacturing specialist, Airborne, who together have established a breakthrough process for the full industrialisation and automation of manufacturing of advanced composite forms with the right quality, flexibility and speed and cost.
Fast, flexible and scalable
With the aim of lowering the system costs and streamline the production of applications made from thermoplastic composites, the digital composites manufacturing line has been developed alongside Industry 4.0 concepts using Siemens’ engineering software enables full quality control through ‘machine learning’ concepts to autonomously improve quality and output. The production line can be controlled remotely, allowing manufacturers to adapt settings according to their design and material properties ‘on the fly’.
Modular in design, the digital composites manufacturing line can be extended by adding material feeders at the front-end or enhanced functionality at the back-end. Since the control of the line is fully-digital, it can offer layup adaptability by running multiple products at the same time. The digital composites manufacturing line is designed for a speed that can produce over a million parts per year, helping to drive the conversion cost ratio down significantly.
“Advanced thermoplastic composites are an emerging solution for applications that demand light weight and high strength to optimise sustainability, performance and design freedom,” begins SABIC’s composites global business leader, Gino Francato. “Widespread adoption of thermoplastic composites depends on three enablers: new material technologies, efficient large-scale production processes and an accurate, scientific prediction of application performance - and SABIC is investing heavily in all three.
“Our growing portfolio of CFRTC offerings, our partnership with Airborne and Siemens on a digital composites large-scale production solution, and our expanding predictive engineering capabilities are three excellent examples of how we are doing this and underscore our unyielding commitment to our customers’ success.”
Laminates have it covered
On its JEC stand, Francato proudly showed-off an electronic device cover – a typical component suitable for mass production on its digital composites manufacturing line, and which is slated to open in The Netherlands in 2019.
“Back in 2012, SABIC formed a team to engage with continuous fibre composites, because we saw an opportunity to move into this space in terms of how we could obtain mass production techniques. We began with continuous carbon fibre composites, tackling the three areas of materials, processing and design. In 2015 we acquired FRP Tapes, a specialised company making thermoplastic tapes with very specific characteristics, and with an eye on mass production and selling to large OEM customers.
“The difficulty is really the spreading of the fibres, because there is always a viscous resin that need to be impregnated into the fibres. FRP Tapes found a way of how to efficiently spread the fibres and make the process really fast with extremely good dimensional stability so that it’s very flat. Although it may seem obvious, it’s not so easy to achieve this because without perfectly flat tape, you cannot have flat sheet.”
SABIC already works closely with many of the biggest global consumer electronics players and has already established its reputation in the sector. Francato says that one of the important factors in gaining entry to the consumer electronics sector is that the qualification time is 6-9 months, compared to automotive, which is much longer.
“This gave us the opportunity to really step into carbon fibre materials manufacture – particularly for applications where the laminate needs to be really thin. We want to introduce mass production for the supply of millions of parts. Our carbon fibre polycarbonate is really thin and we’re looking at production cycle times of around 60 seconds to produce parts like electronics devices covers.
“When we began looking for a partner to achieve the best methods to make these laminates, we couldn’t find anyone capable of making them at the quality, speed and cost that we wanted. Airborne was the ideal partner to expand into other areas like automation, which is what SABIC was lacking because first and foremost, we’re a chemical company that doesn’t really play in the manufacturing automation space.”
SABIC subsequently acquired a stake in Airborne, and because Airborne and SABIC already had a working relationship with Siemens, together the partners quickly developed a solution with Siemens to laminate parts very quickly with the aim of improving mass production of the tape through to the building of the laminate.
“Our relationship with Airborne, as well as being involved with large companies like Siemens proves that SABIC really believes in this concept,” Francato concludes. “Customers have told us that they face three hurdles to the introduction of thermoplastic composites in their applications: cost, cycle time and design predictability. Through materials innovation, disruptive automated digital manufacturing and sophisticated predictive engineering capabilities, SABIC intends to remove these hurdles and pave the way for broad adoption of advanced thermoplastic composites across industries and geographies.”
